Community & social practice · Etwatwa, Gauteng · 2001–present

Intuthuko Embroidery Collective

‘Intuthuko’ means ‘to progress’. A collective of women embroiderers from Etwatwa, east of Johannesburg, founded and facilitated by Celia de Villiers as an economic-empowerment project — whose meticulously hand-stitched work has won awards and shown internationally.

The Intuthuko Embroidery Collective — ‘intuthuko’ is Zulu for ‘to progress’ — makes meticulously hand-stitched works from Etwatwa, east of Johannesburg. Celia de Villiers founded and facilitated the group in 2001 as an economic-empowerment project for women in Eastern Gauteng, teaching design, embroidery and enterprise.

Over more than seventeen years the collective has won national awards for job creation in the arts, and its work has been selected internationally — including the Contextile Contemporary Textile Art Biennial in Guimarães, Portugal. Its hand-stitched pieces are held in local and international corporate collections.

Many of its members are grandmothers, and the collective connects to the wider Grandmother to Grandmother movement of older women holding families and memory together.

Celia de Villiers’ collaborations with the collective include Synchronic Journey, the Contextile panels Madiba & Ubuntu (designed with Kris van ’t Hof), and the award-winning Journey to Freedom narratives.

The collective’s work continues to draw researchers into the present: UNISA psychology professor Puleng Segalo, a longtime collaborator, has used the embroideries in participatory visual research on apartheid memory and women’s lived experience — and in 2019 a group of Intuthuko works was shown at the Venice Biennale, in the ‘Artivism’ Atrocity Prevention Pavilion.